Six young children at a Lubbock, Texas, day care center have tested positive for measles — a dreaded scenario with the potential to accelerate an already out-of-control outbreak that has spread to at least two other states.
More than a dozen other states and Washington, D.C. are dealing with cases of measles unrelated to Texas.
On Friday, the Texas Department of State Health Services said the toll rose to 481 confirmed cases, a 14% jump over last week. Fifty-six people have been hospitalized in the area since the disease started spreading in late January.
At the Tiny Tots U Learning Academy, a center with approximately 230 infants, toddlers and preschool-age children, the outbreak began on March 24, when a little girl who had been sick with fever and vomiting tested positive. She later needed to be hospitalized for pneumonia and trouble breathing.
Kids who have tested positive at the day care so far are between the ages of 5 months and 3 years old, said Maegan Messick, a co-owner of the center. None was fully vaccinated against measles.
For nearly two weeks, Messick has been working with local health officials who are in contact with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the situation. Messick said she’s not been given clear guidance on how to handle measles in such a large day care with so many vulnerable kids.
“From what I’m being told, the CDC doesn’t have a playbook for this,” Messick said. “We’ve just had to make judgment calls.”
The U.S. is facing the largest measles outbreak in six years, but the CDC has remained relatively silent on the public health threat, providing just weekly updates on its website and sending an alert to doctors last month. The agency sent 2,000 doses of the MMR vaccine to Texas health officials at their request, but hasn’t held a news briefing about measles since 2019, when two large outbreaks in New York threatened to reverse the United States’ status of having eliminated the virus.
